Dr Madeleine Pownall
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maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall
@maddipow.bsky.social
2.3K followers 530 following 390 posts

Associate Professor. Keen bean. Writer. Pedagogy, psychology, reflexivity, open science, iced lattes. ABSENT MINDS coming May 2026๐Ÿ“˜. She/her ๐ŸŒป

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maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 8d
I'm so excited to see what this turns into. We put out a call for people interested in joining a community a few months ago, and we've now got 400+ researchers.

Qualitopia will be a space to build community, speak to policy, do metascience, and advocate for qualitative methods in their own right.

Reposted by Sebastian Karcher, Michael Larkin

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 8d
This year, @annayahprosser.bsky.social, Tamarinde Haven, Nicki Lisa Cole, and I have tried to envision the ideal, utopian future for open qualitative research.

We've had community workshops, talks, a charter, grant apps, a special issue, all to build "Qualitopia" for 2026โœจ qualitopia.my.canva.site

Reposted by Madeleine Pownall

dsquintana.bsky.social
Dan Quintana @dsquintana.bsky.social ยท 8d
New paper!

We describe how grassroots networks can help implement and harmonize open research efforts via our experience establishing the Norwegian Reproducibility Network -@norrepro.bsky.social.

doi.org/10.7557/11.8...
Grassroots networks can help implement and harmonize open research efforts Agata Bochynska, Tamara Kalandadze, Max Korbmacher, Lewend Mayiwar, Julien Mayor, Daniel Quintana Abstract Grassroots networks are peer-led, bottom-up initiatives that can drive meaningful change in research reform. Norwegian Reproducibility Network (NORRN), a nation-wide initiative after the model from similar networks around the world, is an example of a grassroots network where a community of researchers works together towards more transparent, rigorous and robust research. By connecting with other researchers, librarians and research support staff across Norwegian universities and colleges as well as various stakeholders, including higher-education institutions and research funders, NORRN aims to help implement and harmonize open and reproducible research efforts across the country. In this paper, we describe the origins, mission,and structure of NORRN and similar networks, as well as successes, challenges and future directions of NORRNโ€™s efforts that show a critical role of grassroots initiatives in supporting research improvement. The map of NORRNโ€™s local and institutional nodes at Norwegian universities and colleges (per 15.10.2025).

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 9d
My precious holiday time is the only thing non-negotiable, so I think this is very good advice!

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 9d
Huge fan of Editors clearing their desk before Christmas but now I have five papers all with revisions due in January ho ho ho help me

Reposted by Robert Bรถhm, Brady T. West, Brendan Nyhan , and 43 more

sabrinanorwood.bsky.social
Sabrina Norwood @sabrinanorwood.bsky.social ยท 9d
Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"
Text reads: About synthetic panels Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels. Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey. Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away. Text reads: Question-writing best practices To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices: Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions. Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, โ€œHow likely are you to tryโ€ฆ?โ€ Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, โ€œWhen did you last visitโ€ฆ?โ€ Text reads: Discussion The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002) of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 10d
8 months later, my soul-consuming solo paper that has accompanied me round the world was just accepted! ๐Ÿ’˜
maddipow.bsky.social Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท Apr 24
I had an idea for a paper at the start of this trip 3 weeks ago and Iโ€™ve been obsessively writing it in every spare moment since. Today it was submitted! This little paper has seen the world with me ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ฉ๐Ÿ‡ฒ๐Ÿ‡พโœˆ๏ธโค๏ธ
Sat in Malaysia in a floral dress in front of my laptop smiling Sat on a plane smiling by the window, with my laptop again Once again, Iโ€™m sat with my laptop this time with an iced latte Sat by some water with a fancy iced coffee with a cherry in it, again with my laptop open

Reposted by Mark D. White, Adrian Vickers, Michael H. Whitworth , and 2 more

epicciuto.bsky.social
Elizabeth Picciuto @epicciuto.bsky.social ยท 10d
Another way to restart the worldโ€™s idea machine is to restore funding and grants to universities, researchers, and artists.
vox.com Vox @vox.com ยท 10d
America, you have spoken loud and clear: You do not like AI. But what if AI is the way to restart the worldโ€™s idea machine?
Weโ€™re running out of good ideas. AI might be how we find new ones.
What if the best use of AI is restarting the worldโ€™s idea machine?
www.vox.com

Reposted by Mark Rubin, Flรกvio Azevedo, Madeleine Pownall

forrt.bsky.social
Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training @forrt.bsky.social ยท 10d
๐Ÿ“ฃWe are excited to announce that FORRT is one of the few initiatives worldwide to be formally endorsed as a Programme of the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development (IDSSD, 2024โ€“2033)! ๐ŸŽ‰

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 16d
Hahaha (or should I say, H_a H_a H_a)

Reposted by Madeleine Pownall

t-fun.bsky.social
T-FฮจN (Teaching-Focused University Network) @t-fun.bsky.social ยท 17d
The elves at T-FUN HQ have been working hard and have 2 presents for you ๐ŸŽ๐ŸŽ! That's right, two exciting online seminars are coming to help you kick off 2026 in scholarly style!

See this thread for brief details & check out our website Events page for full bios and abstracts: t-fun.co.uk?page_id=104
Events โ€“ Teaching-Focused University Network
Teaching-Focused University Network
t-fun.co.uk

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 17d
Happy final lecture day from your friendly neighbourhood statistics lecturers ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐ŸŽ„๐ŸŽ„โœจ @tessaflack.bsky.social

Reposted by Brett Smith, Madeleine Pownall

markrubin.bsky.social
Mark Rubin @markrubin.bsky.social ยท 20d
โ€œPositivism Creepโ€

โ€œThe subtle, often unacknowledged infiltration of positivist or post-positivist assumptions into methodologies where they do not naturally, philosophically, practically, or epistemologically belong.โ€

By @thomasgraves.bsky.social @maddipow.bsky.social @annayahprosser.bsky.social
Many developments to reform the research landscape have occurred over the past decade. These changes have been made with broad goals to improve the โ€˜opennessโ€™ of research and often assumed to be โ€˜methodologically -agnosticโ€™; that is, they ostensibly have benefits for all researchers occupying all epistemological and methodological positions. โ€˜Open scienceโ€™ initiatives such as study pre-registration (i.e., specifying research aims and analytical plan ahead of data access), open data sharing, open-access publication, and open materials sharing are becoming increasingly mainstream across many fields within social research and the natural sciences. While there has been much criticism of these interventions, largely from the qualitative research community, we want to draw attention to a troubling trend in the promotion of open science: the leaking of standards relevant only to quantitative research to all paradigms. Or, as others refer to it, โ€œpositivism creepโ€. Here, we situate positivism creep (i.e., the creeping of positivist conventions to all research) within research policy, we highlight its increasing prevalence within open science reforms, and we warn against a future which could alienate many non-positivist scholars. We argue that the primary framing of open science as the pursuit of reproducibility and objectivity risks promoting positivism creep in the social sciences and humanities. In particular, we suggest that overly strict open research requirements placed by funders may reduce the range and variety of epistemological positions that can be taken by researchers, with particularly deleterious effects for qualitative researchers.

Reposted by Brett Smith, Flรกvio Azevedo

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 20d
New preprint with Thomas Graves and @annayahprosser.bsky.social: "Getting Creeped Out? Open Science, Qualitative Methods, and the Dangers of Positivism Creep".

osf.io/preprints/so...
OSF
osf.io

Reposted by Mark J. Brandt, Flรกvio Azevedo, Madeleine Pownall

helenahartmann.com
Dr. Helena Hartmann (she/her) @helenahartmann.com ยท 22d
It has been a while since @flavioazevedo.bsky.social asked me to take over the Reversals project at @forrt.bsky.social...

It has since evolved beyond my wildest dreams, mostly thanks to @aufdroeseler.bsky.social & @lukaswallrich.bsky.social.

We are very proud of the Replication Hub & Database โ™ฅ๏ธ

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 23d
"We publish imagined research abstracts as works of fiction firstly because writing for enjoyment is a good thing to encourage...writing imaginatively is a good way to reshape our relationship with writing into something creative and enjoyable"

Reposted by Madeleine Pownall

olivia.science
Olivia Guest ยท ฮŸฮปฮฏฮฒฮนฮฑ ฮ“ฮบฮตฯƒฯ„ @olivia.science ยท 24d
Finally, we end on:

"The future [under the sway of AI risks being] a constant rehashing of the past, wherein human creativity and communication are not only mediated by but controlled by companies. In the midst of this nonsense, we must nourish
hope in shared values"

doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

8/
7 Epilogue We have given our perspective on AI through five possible angles as depicted in Figure 1: concep- tual clarity, critical thinking, decoloniality, respecting expertise, and slow science. If our warnings go unheeded, we foresee the harms to academia will continue. If we do not enact scientific and pedagogical shifts โ€” by inter alia teaching and reckoning with our own collective human past and present โ€” we, in cognitive science specifically, will continue to deny our students knowledge of the history of computational prehistories from other cultures and time periods, an abdication of the duty of any so-called experts in AI; mutatis mutandis for other fields and their histories. AI not only ends the past, and makes the present frantic, it also forecloses any future. Under AIโ€™s sway, the future is neither bright as the technopositivists promise, nor a descent into rule by robotic overloads, but a constant rehashing of the past, wherein human creativity and communication are not only mediated by controlled by companies. In the midst of this nonsense, we must nourish hope in shared values, skills, and humanity.

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 24d
The head of open research at Taylor & Francis was supportive when we had a chat and agreed to create some guidelines for living SRs in the first instance, so happy to connect you up if that's useful

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 24d
Iโ€™d love to hear about how you get on with piloting this!

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 24d
I am so happy to see this. After the metascience conference in July I spoke with a few publishers to try and propose something similar to this (registered reports meets โ€œlivingโ€ systematic review) but the idea never really got off the ground. This paper is so important and I LOVE it
dsquintana.bsky.social Dan Quintana @dsquintana.bsky.social ยท 24d
New preprint ๐ŸŽ‰ Living systematic reviews ensure evidence stays current osf.io/preprints/ps...

In this brief comment (all four pages are here โฌ‡๏ธ), @iaiversen.bsky.social and I cover the benefits and challenges of living systematic reviews, along with two ways to increase their uptake

๐Ÿงต 1/8

Reposted by Madeleine Pownall

dsquintana.bsky.social
Dan Quintana @dsquintana.bsky.social ยท 24d
Systematic reviews often guide policy and theory, but they can become quickly outdated. Almost 10% of systematic reviews are out of date even *before they are published*.

Living systematic reviews (LSRs) continuously integrate new evidence, therefore they offer a solution to this problem.

2/8

Reposted by Mark Rubin, Madeleine Pownall, Johannes Breuer

dsquintana.bsky.social
Dan Quintana @dsquintana.bsky.social ยท 24d
New preprint ๐ŸŽ‰ Living systematic reviews ensure evidence stays current osf.io/preprints/ps...

In this brief comment (all four pages are here โฌ‡๏ธ), @iaiversen.bsky.social and I cover the benefits and challenges of living systematic reviews, along with two ways to increase their uptake

๐Ÿงต 1/8

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 29d
P.S you can preorder it here www.waterstones.com/book/absent-...
Absent Minds by Dr Madeleine Pownall | Waterstones
Buy Absent Minds by Dr Madeleine Pownall from Waterstones today! Click and Collect from your local Waterstones or get FREE UK delivery on orders over ยฃ25.
www.waterstones.com

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท 29d
I was proofreading my book on the train and the man next to me audibly complained when I moved the page before heโ€™d finished reading over my shoulder. Fair play

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท Nov 26
Wow!

maddipow.bsky.social
Dr Madeleine Pownall @maddipow.bsky.social ยท Nov 24
This is such wonderful news. Simine has done so much for advocating for robust, fair, transparent practices throughout psychology and beyond ๐Ÿ‘
tomhardwicke.bsky.social Tom Hardwicke @tomhardwicke.bsky.social ยท Nov 24
Congratulations to @simine.com well deserved winner of the Einstein Foundation Individual Award for Promoting Quality in Research 2025 ๐ŸŽ‰ www.einsteinfoundation.de/en/media/pre...

Reposted by Madeleine Pownall

dsquintana.bsky.social
Dan Quintana @dsquintana.bsky.social ยท Nov 24
There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts.

Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...
This paper provides guidance and tools for conducting open and reproducible systematic reviews in psychology. It emphasizes the importance of systematic reviews for evidence-based decision-making and the growing adoption of open science practices. Open science enhances transparency, reproducibility, and minimizes bias in systematic reviews by sharing data, materials, and code. It also fosters collaborations and enables involvement of non-academic stakeholders. The paper is designed for beginners, offering accessible guidance to navigate the many standards and resources that may not obviously align with specific areas of psychology. It covers systematic review conduct standards, pre-registration, registered reports, reporting standards, and open data, materials and code. The paper is concluded with a glimpse of recent innovations like Community Augmented Meta-Analysis and independent reproducibility checks.

Reposted by Madeleine Pownall, Josรฉ Pina-Sรกnchez

pwgtennant.bsky.social
Peter Tennant @pwgtennant.bsky.social ยท Nov 24
HYBRID EVENT: 'Introduction to Quantitative Bias' with Rachel Hughes on Monday 1st December at 10am-12pm UK time.

For those near Leeds, bring your laptop and enjoy this as an in-person session!

Sign-up before 9am on Thursday 27th via: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/introducti...

Reposted by Madeleine Pownall

briannosek.bsky.social
Brian Nosek @briannosek.bsky.social ยท Nov 24
Science is a collective effort, but @simine.com is a singular force. She is an exemplary model for all of us to follow in her commitment and action to improving science, on every dimension.

She is so deserving of the award. The only uncertainty is whether the award deserves her!
tomhardwicke.bsky.social Tom Hardwicke @tomhardwicke.bsky.social ยท Nov 24
Congratulations to @simine.com well deserved winner of the Einstein Foundation Individual Award for Promoting Quality in Research 2025 ๐ŸŽ‰ www.einsteinfoundation.de/en/media/pre...

Reposted by Dorothy Bishop, Brian A. Nosek, Ian Hussey , and 1 more

tomhardwicke.bsky.social
Tom Hardwicke @tomhardwicke.bsky.social ยท Nov 24
Congratulations to @simine.com well deserved winner of the Einstein Foundation Individual Award for Promoting Quality in Research 2025 ๐ŸŽ‰ www.einsteinfoundation.de/en/media/pre...